Raymond Chen's articles are true wealth of contemporary tech-lore. My favorite is the one where a user reported error on Flight Simulator map [0] and it escalated all the way up to Bill Gates & the then chief of FS division.
Raymond's work often uses analogies to everyday, real life situations to make the technical stuff more relatable. Sometimes, these end up being bizarre and even nightmarish. It's like a glimpse into some alternate world where the denizens are adversarial, hyper pedantic, scheming, criminally insane, or just plain stupid.
"Sometimes I’m in a hurry, and I want to make sure I am the next person to get served at the deli counter. To do this, I find whoever has the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. But sometimes somebody else comes in who’s also in a hurry. That person knocks me unconscious and steals my ticket. My plan is to set my watch alarm to wake me up periodically, and each time it wakes me up, I find the person with the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. Is there a better way?"
"This is like asking for a cheeseburger and then trying to peel every last bit of cheese off the patty to turn it into a plain hamburger."
"This is like driving up to a bridge, seeing a 'Bridge out of order' sign, then getting out of your car, moving the sign, driving onto the bridge, falling into the river, and then complaining to the car manufacturer that their car doesn’t work."
"This is like calling the natural gas utility company’s emergency number to report a major gas leak in your house. The gas company sends a technician over, and they can’t find any leak. They ask how you came to suspect that there’s a gas leak, and you tell them, 'Oh, I didn’t smell anything. I called you because I’m hoping to learn more about how to recognize the smell of gas. Do you have any tips?'"
"This is like 'I have this cupboard full of rubbish, so I will solve that by nailing the doors shut'"
"It’s like asking, 'What happens to the phrase 1 cup sugar when I eat my cookies?' The phrase 1 cup sugar was part of the instructions for making the cookies"
years ago my father got a decomissioned, wiped clean notebook from work and asked me to set it up for him. i didn't want to shell out a hundred bucks for windows, so i suggested trying linux (ubuntu) and he agreed. "intrepid ibex" was installed without issues. a few weeks later i asked him if everything was ok and how he liked it, and he had no complaints, except one: he didn't like the edgy skull on the desktop wallpaper: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_version_history#/media/...
This is completely off topic but I'm shocked that zdnet autoplayed a video with audio on after I opened the page and scrolled down a little. Incredible that we still have websites whose primary purpose isn't playing audio automatically play audio. There's no way this doesn't annoy a vast majority of users.
This phenomenon terrifies me greatly - how large organisations can be ignorant of the basics of their purpose. I believe it is one and the same mechanism of collective incompetence, which can affect both a media company, a school, or a government. It's as if the humanity, under any system, were bound to create inhospitable conditions for one another.
I'll see your CD cover with three people in their underwear, plus a hologram of the top half of a possibly naked baby on the Microsoft Windows box, and raise you the top half of several naked SGI "Skinny Hackers" in a projected texture map illustration of an ACM publication:
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
>I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service. She says that a guest spotted the “Powered by FreeBSD” logo at the bottom of the login page, and was offended; the guest was convinced that either we or the hotel management “worshipped the Devil” and refused to stay at the hotel unless the logo was removed. The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad. The hotel stands to lose more than $1000 if the guest, who had originally planned to stay for a long period, moves out.
>One of our tech support people also got a call directly from the hotel guest, who claimed that having the logo on the page constituted “abuse.” The guest also claimed to be “losing money” because she wouldn’t use the hotspot if there was a “devil” on the splash page. He didn’t even realize what she was talking about at first…. He couldn’t imagine why on Earth this person was calling him and going on about devils.
>Attempts at misguided religious censorship notwithstanding, I don’t want to see one of my ISP’s customers lose business. And I’d like to keep a FreeBSD logo on our hotspot page. Is there artwork that doesn’t include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?
> ``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''
> Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.
> ``Are you a Satanist?''
> Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.
> ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.''
> ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.
> I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''
> ``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''
It's impossible for me to determine whether it looks like a skull now because my mind was contaminated with the notion that it's a skull before I had a chance to look.
The most shocking thing for me on this was that Ivex was such a shit version of Linux and gave me such trouble I put Linux off for 10 more years after that crap. It was not at all ready for normal people. Night and day different to Linux today.
According to Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen on his blog The Old New Thing, Red moon desert was originally intended to be Windows XP's default wallpaper, but was allegedly changed due to some testers feeling it resembled a pair of buttocks, leading to O'Rear's other photo Bliss becoming the default wallpaper. While this wallpaper was temporarily set as the default wallpaper during Whistler, this story does not appear to be true; Bliss had already been selected based on extensive research by design manager Rob Girling and his team, and the Luna visual style shares the same color scheme as the wallpaper. It is more likely the wallpaper was set to default as a decoy; the unleaked Lab06 build 2415 predates build 2423, and shows Bliss set as the wallpaper.
The only people who might plausibly think that were probably also jerking it to late night scrambled skin-e-max in the 90’s when it was basically just hard R.
I’ve seen that background hundreds of times, and it never even occurred to me.
I find it worrying because being super sensitive to stuff like that is usually red flag that the person is kinda into it - Senators in Bathroom stalls and all that (bonus if you get the reference).
But I think the person who directly contacted Microsoft about this was probably not the person who noticed it and brought it up on the Government side just the Person who was tasked with communicating about it so its good they remain nameless.
I think they mean it was someone in the government who complained and that complaint went to their IT department, and it was the poor IT department who had to complain to Microsoft.
Or something like that. Basically, the person from the government who contacted them was the sad messenger and not the original complainer.
maybe this is the real reason why governments don't switch to Linux: the nerdy images. Because we can't have that in an official government building, no sir, it's all numbers and abstract icons in here please :-)
I'm kind of offended they changed them all. At some point you just have to say 'okay this is just complete bullshit' and stand for the things you create. Otherwise everything ends up in this corporate bland soup of nothingness. Of course we know where Microsoft ended up, but I doesn't have to be that way.
By all means be pragmatic if it's a government complaining, but you don't have to take all crazy feedback at face value.
Yeah, I feel the same way. Most cases where someone complains that they are offended should be handled by not responding to them at all. Instead, organizations will bend over backwards to avoid even the most esoteric claims of taking offense.
Unfortunately the wider cultural movement "we must avoid offending anyone at all costs" got us here. It's not only corporations, many people also behave like this in private. It's sad, but it is what it is, the only thing you can do is searching for small pockets of people who aren't insane.
It doesn’t matter if Microsoft cares about offending people. If some executive is not going to buy 2 million licenses of Windows because they are personally offended by the font used somewhere, then Microsoft is gonna change it.
I mean, Raymond Chen has been writing The Old New Thing consistently for over 20 years. Nearly every single entry is interesting, informative, and illuminating, aimed at every facet of software engineering, old and new, over the decades. He may be part of the final bastion of quality and care for detail at MS, dwindling and faint as it is.
Windows doesn't need or deserve defending. It's atrocious. But this is a silly comment.
Have to say this never would have occurred to me. There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures, ie the Totoro bathtub scene [1], search for "family bathing scene".
I guess if this hologram offended people, there must be some nice stories about Nirvana's Nevermind (1991).
Though now it's long buried in internet folklore graveyard, there once was a popular shock image (and an associated website) called "goatse". (If you never heard of it, you better NOT google it).
For awhile, people had been spotting goatse in several logos.
> Sound familiar? It should, because it's also an apt description of... well, you know. A butthole.
Good news! Cornholio.ai isn't registered by anyone as a domain name, so someone with sufficient motivation and a love for Beavis and Butthead could totally instruct an LLM to make a satirical AI-butthole-logo themed website.
Bonus points if it has affiliate links to Amazon or other online stores selling TP (for the bunghole, of course).
> There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures
I’m not going to be able to find this, but I remember some piece of news having to do with a woman and a photograph of her with naked breasts.
Someone found examples of how it had been reported in the US and a European country. Both used the same picture and only censored one area: the face in the European country, the breasts in the US.
You can just as well say the logos look like flowers, suns, plasma balls, retinas. If you choose to only see anuses on all of them, that's really on you.
> Windows XP had its own share of complaints. The original wallpaper for Windows XP was Red Moon Desert, until people claimed that Red Moon Desert looked like a pair of buttocks.
The original 1989 SimCity box was a Rorschach test that cost Maxis $50k.
The cover was a Bakelite toy city simulator appliance with a red MONSTER disaster button, and a stompy T-Rex-looking creature waving over San Francisco on its TV screen.
Maxis never called it Godzilla on the box or in the game. Reviewers looked at the inkblot and saw Godzilla anyway.
In Feb 2024 I emailed Jeff Braun (Maxis co-founder/CEO) and asked what actually happened and how much Maxis had to pay. He wrote back the same day:
> Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement.
All the box scans are in the Micropolis repo -- high res front, back with the "floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters" disaster list, side panels, and the platform variants, each with descriptions:
The back of the box kept advertising monsters as a feature the same year the monster got lawyered off the front.
The function names in the code all refered to it like "MakeMonster()", but admittedly there was a "GOD" symbol in the code used to index the Monster sprite likw "GetSprite(GOD)", but Toho could not have know that, since it was a C preprocessor macro that was compiled away in the binary:
I mean the image on the box was of a knockoff Godzilla figure (https://www.ebay.com/itm/277052192573) and the "monster" scenario in the game involved him attacking Tokyo, so I think it's pretty clearly meant to reference Godzilla.
TBH I don't have many problems on that and even changing clothes on public beaches in Spain neither.
I've gotten far more aroused with a nerdy/metalhead woman talking about geeky stuff (and her outfit) than just average naked bodies where in the end most of the "mistery" runs away and, well, it shows up the whole mediocre shapes everyone has, myself included.
Tons of anorexya/bulimia issues would dissappear once people discovered that, well... almost no one it's a supermodel at all, and even that-supposedly-all-hot-girl for sure has some sort of issue with some spot or whatever in her body.
Kinda like libre operating systems with the code wide open in your hands. Tons of technology wonders with shiny UI's are full of crude patches. Humans are similar.
I’ve never heard these criticisms about Windows before.
My challenge to the author would be to address the much more serious criticisms of Windows that have been frustrating real users and have been left unresolved.
Address the forced Microsoft login in Windows 11. Even walled garden Apple doesn’t force that in their desktop OS.
Address the pre-installed junkware games that plagued Windows 10.
Address the Bing and Edge nags and hostility toward the will of the user.
Address sending my start menu search query to bing by default, and how Windows search is horrendous compared to every other OS. How is a free program made by a single person able to perform faster and with more accurate results? (Everything)
Address the fact that Microsoft still tolerates OEMs dumping spyware/junkware/scareware like McAfee on their computers when you buy them new.
Address the nags to put my data on OneDrive.
Address the dual hidden right click context menus in File Explorer that annoy power users to this day.
Address the fact that File Explorer will hang for multiple seconds with completely unresponsive UI upon bootup if you pin a network share that is no longer accessible.
Address the reason why the taskbar lost its decades-old customization options with Windows 11.
Address the disaster that was the Windows 8 UI, which was even more of a disaster in the context of Windows Server where tablet UI made even less sense.
Address the reason why telemetry fingerprints your connected devices and installed programs and sends that private information to Microsoft by default.
Address the reason why a $200 OS charges an extra dollar for HEVC video extensions support to gain compatibility with the most popular phone in the world like it’s a sleazy used car dealership.
Address the fact that a $200 retail price operating system made by one of the largest and most resourced companies in the world is somehow slower, less user-friendly, has less stable drivers, and is an overall worse experience than a grocery store ice cream aisle stocked full of free operating systems cobbled together by volunteers. This has gotten so bad that mainstream technology influencers and very non-technicial surface-level mainstream audience phone and car reviewers like Marques Brownlee start recommending Linux.
In what universe does it make any logical sense that I abandoned the operating system made by the creator of DirectX, Xbox, and the owner of potentially the largest collection of game studios in the world because a game developed and published by that very same company (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) continually crashed with my mainstream commercial graphics card on that company’s OS? By switching to a different OS that’s not even supposed to be compatible with this game, my graphics driver instability stopped entirely. (AMD RX 9070XT, a top-of-the-line most recent generation GPU).
It seems like the purpose of this article is to humanize this OS that comes from a monopolistic and generally horrible, unethical company; to say “everyone will criticize Windows over anything minor, when it’s actually a great artisan OS made by real people. Look, we put a picture of a baby on the sticker! How cute.”
While I agree that Microsoft employees are real people who aren’t necessarily responsible for the draconian choices of their C-suite lords, and that making any functioning modern OS is no small feat, let’s not pretend that Windows wouldn’t be a better much OS if it was produced by someone else — almost anyone else.
I can guarantee you that Raymond had zero input on any of these decisions. He values fundamentals, quality, and customer satisfaction more than anybody. But ultimately, is just an "individual contributor" engineer down in the trenches following orders. He probably feels the same way you do about this stuff. The real question for me is, why does a famous person like him, with so many options open to him about where he works and what he works on, continue slogging away in Redmond.
My best guess is that he has devoted most of his working life to Windows, and it would be painful give up on it. He has lived through many dark periods, i.e. ME, Vista, Windows 8, and is probably optimistic about the pendulum swinging back towards quality/fundamentals eventually.
My mistake. I am not sure that the 2003 tag was on the title when I commented, but I should have seen it in the blog itself.
That said, Microsoft was even more of a danger to the industry in 2003, and it was far more of a monopolist. Here he was basically downplaying government scrutiny of Microsoft at the height of their antitrust allegations. I could have made my point more compelling had I realized this came out in 2003.
I was watching YouTube the other day and it was talking about Nirvana's Nevermind album, showed the album cover but with a square censoring part of it. In these cases it really is the censor themselves who is debauched. Reminds me of the classic story where Samuel Johnson left out some rude words from his dictionary. He was congratulated for having left them out, to which he is said to have quipped "I congratulate you on being able to look them up!"
It might sound silly to censor an album cover, but on the other hand why risk Google locking your whole account due to some automated check from which you have no recourse?
> Until we got a complaint from a government (who shall remain nameless for obvious reasons) that was upset with Windows 95 because it depicted naked children.
How dare you violate the government's exclusive right to naked children!
[edited to more align with the essay's thesis, thanks to the reply for pointing out misalignment]
I don't think anyone complained about the hologram or red moon desert background because they disliked windows; they complained because they were hypersensitive to possible inappropriate/sexual connotations in imagery.
(Conversely, I very much doubt that the baby hologram or the red moon desert background swayed anyone to dislike Windows.)
People who hated Windows for being Windows would complain about it on technical grounds. It was terrible, and it crashed all the time. People who hated Windows because it was by Microsoft, would complain about Microsoft's bundling and monopoly tactics.
This does not seem to be related to the article. OP is about red moon and naked baby and clouds. It does not claim that anyone hated windows because of that.
Usually I wouldn't comment just to point out offtopic, but I think "instant bad thoughts every time windows is mentioned, no matter the context" is another psychological effect caused by Microsoft.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20170418-00/?p=95...
Raymond's work often uses analogies to everyday, real life situations to make the technical stuff more relatable. Sometimes, these end up being bizarre and even nightmarish. It's like a glimpse into some alternate world where the denizens are adversarial, hyper pedantic, scheming, criminally insane, or just plain stupid.
"Sometimes I’m in a hurry, and I want to make sure I am the next person to get served at the deli counter. To do this, I find whoever has the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. But sometimes somebody else comes in who’s also in a hurry. That person knocks me unconscious and steals my ticket. My plan is to set my watch alarm to wake me up periodically, and each time it wakes me up, I find the person with the lowest number, knock them unconscious, and steal their ticket. Is there a better way?"
"This is like asking for a cheeseburger and then trying to peel every last bit of cheese off the patty to turn it into a plain hamburger."
"This is like driving up to a bridge, seeing a 'Bridge out of order' sign, then getting out of your car, moving the sign, driving onto the bridge, falling into the river, and then complaining to the car manufacturer that their car doesn’t work."
"This is like calling the natural gas utility company’s emergency number to report a major gas leak in your house. The gas company sends a technician over, and they can’t find any leak. They ask how you came to suspect that there’s a gas leak, and you tell them, 'Oh, I didn’t smell anything. I called you because I’m hoping to learn more about how to recognize the smell of gas. Do you have any tips?'"
"This is like 'I have this cupboard full of rubbish, so I will solve that by nailing the doors shut'"
"It’s like asking, 'What happens to the phrase 1 cup sugar when I eat my cookies?' The phrase 1 cup sugar was part of the instructions for making the cookies"
https://www.zdnet.com/article/canonical-turns-20-shaping-the...
This phenomenon terrifies me greatly - how large organisations can be ignorant of the basics of their purpose. I believe it is one and the same mechanism of collective incompetence, which can affect both a media company, a school, or a government. It's as if the humanity, under any system, were bound to create inhospitable conditions for one another.
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34129571
"Yes, we have a dress code. You have to dress." – Scott McNealy
On the other hand, down the road at SGI there was a practice called "Skinnyhacking"!
https://rdtk.net/internet/how-do-you-check-a-computer-s-comp...
>Snowsinger. November 21, 2020 at 07:48.
>A truly excellent review of the history of Silicon Graphics. I worked in the Australian Sales office as their 1st engineer in the Asia Pacific region. Was trained in MtView the 1st week the MtView campus opened. The 1st system I worked on was the IRIS 1000 and subsequently all the products from then on till I left in mid-2009 when the Australian Engineering division was shut. A great company with great people who just wanted to engineer the best Graphics experience on the planet until we lost focus and vision of what we did well. Brings to Mind the Skinny Hackers, the Rocktain event, PCP monitoring, CXFS (Clustered File Systems), Failsafe, Diskless boot, Voxel vision, and so many other engineering wins. A great company, great people, & the drive to make a better computing world. Thank you for the memories and documenting the history of a company that did make some huge breakthroughs in Computer Graphics & Computing architecture. Just go ask NVIDIA, Cray and now HP!! Also a shout out to Jim Clark & his team for the vision and determination to bring the Graphics Engine to world, the heart of the IRIS workstation and subsequent graphics systems.
https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sgi.misc/c/X50cCoYrU20/...
>Tom Davis, Mar 22, 1993, 6:06:21 PM, comp.sys.sgi.misc
>In article <[email protected]>, [email protected] (Dave Olson) writes:
|> In <[email protected]> [email protected] (Jason Heirtzler) writes:
|> | Okay, I gotta know. Whom does the phrase "The Skinny Hackers" refer to?
|> A small group of (fairly skinny ;) ) folks who are also great hackers/developers and mostly long time SGI employees. Among other fruits of their group hackerdom was the original showcase.
>Being skinny didn't have anything to do with it. Although Showcase was the best known product of the skinnyhackers, the first product was an image of them made from a photo of all three sitting naked at computer terminals, busily hacking. On top of the photo was the international "no" symbol (red circle with a line across it), and underneath, the words "No Skinnyhacking".
>Note: Skinnyhacking is a dangerous activity, and should only be performed by professionals. Do NOT attempt it at home.
>If you're interested, you can see the image in the most recent (1992) SIGGRAPH proceedings, in distored form on the back cover, and in non-distored form on page 252.
>I can't imagine that anyone would want a copy of this image, but I have one in SGI format. (Actually, the secret goal is to have this image overtake the mandrill in popularity.)
|> I won't speak further to protect their secret identities ;)
>I will! It was me! Tom Davis! The bald guy in the front! Oh, and the other two are Rocky Rhodes and Scott Carr. Ann Sydeman joined the group a short time later, but unfortunately missed the initial photo session (although there was a subsequent video ...). Paul Haeberli was the photographer.
[Fortunately I found a pdf of the paper with the image:]
"Fast Shadows and Lighting Effects Using Texture Mapping", by Mark Segal, Carl Korobkin, Rolf van Widenfelt, Jim Foran, Paul Haeberli, Silicon Graphics Computer Systems. Computer Graphics, 26,2, July 1992, Page 252, Figure 3: Simulating a Slide Projector:
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/133994.134071
Ah, that would be 8.10 with the coffee stain wallpaper :-P
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_screenshot.png
https://halfblog.net/2011/12/04/daemon-worship/
>I just got a call from the owner of a hotel for which we provide hotspot service. She says that a guest spotted the “Powered by FreeBSD” logo at the bottom of the login page, and was offended; the guest was convinced that either we or the hotel management “worshipped the Devil” and refused to stay at the hotel unless the logo was removed. The owner could make no headway by explaining that the besneakered mascot was a cartoon character and was a daemon, not the Devil. And she feared upsetting the guest even more if she said that large portions of the same software are inside every Mac and iPad. The hotel stands to lose more than $1000 if the guest, who had originally planned to stay for a long period, moves out.
>One of our tech support people also got a call directly from the hotel guest, who claimed that having the logo on the page constituted “abuse.” The guest also claimed to be “losing money” because she wouldn’t use the hotspot if there was a “devil” on the splash page. He didn’t even realize what she was talking about at first…. He couldn’t imagine why on Earth this person was calling him and going on about devils.
>Attempts at misguided religious censorship notwithstanding, I don’t want to see one of my ISP’s customers lose business. And I’d like to keep a FreeBSD logo on our hotspot page. Is there artwork that doesn’t include horned creatures that might offend the ignorant or superstitious?
>–Brett Glass
> ``Pardon us, ma'am. Mind if we ask you a question?''
> Well, people keep telling me that Texans are real friendly, so I nodded.
> ``Are you a Satanist?''
> Well, at least they didn't ask me if I liked to party.
> ``Uh, no, I can't say that I am.''
> ``Gee, ma'am. Are you sure about that?'' they asked.
> I put on my biggest, brightest Dallas Cowboys cheerleader smile and said, ``No, I'm positive. The closest I've ever come to Satanism is watching Geraldo.''
> ``Hmmm. Interesting. See, we was just wondering why it is you have the lord of darkness on your chest there.''
And it continues…
Three dates ending in 6... 666... What is this Satanic inception?
Windows has been free since at least VXKC4. Microsoft wouldn’t exist as anything but an Excel vendor today if it were any other way; it’s intentional.
(Ubuntu was the right choice.)
https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com/p/038-design...
I suppose it looks like buttocks?
According to Microsoft programmer Raymond Chen on his blog The Old New Thing, Red moon desert was originally intended to be Windows XP's default wallpaper, but was allegedly changed due to some testers feeling it resembled a pair of buttocks, leading to O'Rear's other photo Bliss becoming the default wallpaper. While this wallpaper was temporarily set as the default wallpaper during Whistler, this story does not appear to be true; Bliss had already been selected based on extensive research by design manager Rob Girling and his team, and the Luna visual style shares the same color scheme as the wallpaper. It is more likely the wallpaper was set to default as a decoy; the unleaked Lab06 build 2415 predates build 2423, and shows Bliss set as the wallpaper.
I’ve seen that background hundreds of times, and it never even occurred to me.
Now I can’t unsee it. The butt is real.
Back in the day tons of people decoded it under PC's and a TV tuner with Wilma/MoreTV under Windows and in a hackier way, XawTV+XawTV Nagra.
That's not what 'this looks like ass' means.
But I think the person who directly contacted Microsoft about this was probably not the person who noticed it and brought it up on the Government side just the Person who was tasked with communicating about it so its good they remain nameless.
Given that this request was not related to national security, they really should publish the name.
Or something like that. Basically, the person from the government who contacted them was the sad messenger and not the original complainer.
https://github.com/plotjuggler/plotjuggler
I have had to do a last-minute fix on a build because a developer added emojis to success messages
a fire emoji
on software for handling industrial machinery that can explode
our QA department was not happy about that let me say that...
Looking at it from a distance indeed may raise some brows.
Did this comment already put me on a list?
cought me off guard while drinking coffee
By all means be pragmatic if it's a government complaining, but you don't have to take all crazy feedback at face value.
In this case, it’s pure business.
Windows doesn't need or deserve defending. It's atrocious. But this is a silly comment.
People just forgot.
I am sure that in 2050, there will be blog posts about Windows 11 that won't make people enrage.
Have to say this never would have occurred to me. There are also examples of US people being offended by scenes considered harmless in other cultures, ie the Totoro bathtub scene [1], search for "family bathing scene".
I guess if this hologram offended people, there must be some nice stories about Nirvana's Nevermind (1991).
[0] https://velvetshark.com/ai-company-logos-that-look-like-butt...
[1] https://uk.movies.yahoo.com/my-neighbour-totoro-10-things-di...
For awhile, people had been spotting goatse in several logos.
Good news! Cornholio.ai isn't registered by anyone as a domain name, so someone with sufficient motivation and a love for Beavis and Butthead could totally instruct an LLM to make a satirical AI-butthole-logo themed website.
Bonus points if it has affiliate links to Amazon or other online stores selling TP (for the bunghole, of course).
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2025/oct/02/nirvana-neverm...
I’m not going to be able to find this, but I remember some piece of news having to do with a woman and a photograph of her with naked breasts.
Someone found examples of how it had been reported in the US and a European country. Both used the same picture and only censored one area: the face in the European country, the breasts in the US.
oh thanks, now I cannot unsee it. :)
> We had to change them all
The cover was a Bakelite toy city simulator appliance with a red MONSTER disaster button, and a stompy T-Rex-looking creature waving over San Francisco on its TV screen.
Maxis never called it Godzilla on the box or in the game. Reviewers looked at the inkblot and saw Godzilla anyway.
Original monster cover:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...
Revised cover after the lawsuit, monster swapped for a tornado (the MONSTER button survived):
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/m...
In Feb 2024 I emailed Jeff Braun (Maxis co-founder/CEO) and asked what actually happened and how much Maxis had to pay. He wrote back the same day:
> Maxis was sued by Toho. We never referred to the name Godzilla, our monster on the box cover was a T-Rex looking character, but... a few magazine reviews called the monster, Godzilla. That was all it took. Toho called it "confusion in the marketplace". We paid $50k for Godzilla to go away. In all honesty, Toho liked Maxis, they said $50k was the minimum they take for Godzilla infringement.
All the box scans are in the Micropolis repo -- high res front, back with the "floods, earthquakes, fires, tornados, meltdowns and monsters" disaster list, side panels, and the platform variants, each with descriptions:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...
Full email thread:
https://github.com/SimHacker/MicropolisCore/blob/main/docume...
The back of the box kept advertising monsters as a feature the same year the monster got lawyered off the front.
The function names in the code all refered to it like "MakeMonster()", but admittedly there was a "GOD" symbol in the code used to index the Monster sprite likw "GetSprite(GOD)", but Toho could not have know that, since it was a C preprocessor macro that was compiled away in the binary:
https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis/blob/master/micropol...
If this body part is obscene, shouldn’t the author do the moral thing and remove his own?
Tons of anorexya/bulimia issues would dissappear once people discovered that, well... almost no one it's a supermodel at all, and even that-supposedly-all-hot-girl for sure has some sort of issue with some spot or whatever in her body.
Kinda like libre operating systems with the code wide open in your hands. Tons of technology wonders with shiny UI's are full of crude patches. Humans are similar.
By the same logic:
If God didn't mean for people to cannibalize each other, we wouldn't be made of meat.
Flanders and Swan: The Reluctant Cannibal:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEvh8qY-QRo
Seriously though, I love babies!
...I just can't eat a whole one...
(Although a little dressing does improve the taste.)
My challenge to the author would be to address the much more serious criticisms of Windows that have been frustrating real users and have been left unresolved.
Address the forced Microsoft login in Windows 11. Even walled garden Apple doesn’t force that in their desktop OS.
Address the pre-installed junkware games that plagued Windows 10.
Address the Bing and Edge nags and hostility toward the will of the user.
Address sending my start menu search query to bing by default, and how Windows search is horrendous compared to every other OS. How is a free program made by a single person able to perform faster and with more accurate results? (Everything)
Address the fact that Microsoft still tolerates OEMs dumping spyware/junkware/scareware like McAfee on their computers when you buy them new.
Address the nags to put my data on OneDrive.
Address the dual hidden right click context menus in File Explorer that annoy power users to this day.
Address the fact that File Explorer will hang for multiple seconds with completely unresponsive UI upon bootup if you pin a network share that is no longer accessible.
Address the reason why the taskbar lost its decades-old customization options with Windows 11.
Address the disaster that was the Windows 8 UI, which was even more of a disaster in the context of Windows Server where tablet UI made even less sense.
Address the reason why telemetry fingerprints your connected devices and installed programs and sends that private information to Microsoft by default.
Address the reason why a $200 OS charges an extra dollar for HEVC video extensions support to gain compatibility with the most popular phone in the world like it’s a sleazy used car dealership.
Address the fact that a $200 retail price operating system made by one of the largest and most resourced companies in the world is somehow slower, less user-friendly, has less stable drivers, and is an overall worse experience than a grocery store ice cream aisle stocked full of free operating systems cobbled together by volunteers. This has gotten so bad that mainstream technology influencers and very non-technicial surface-level mainstream audience phone and car reviewers like Marques Brownlee start recommending Linux.
In what universe does it make any logical sense that I abandoned the operating system made by the creator of DirectX, Xbox, and the owner of potentially the largest collection of game studios in the world because a game developed and published by that very same company (Indiana Jones and the Great Circle) continually crashed with my mainstream commercial graphics card on that company’s OS? By switching to a different OS that’s not even supposed to be compatible with this game, my graphics driver instability stopped entirely. (AMD RX 9070XT, a top-of-the-line most recent generation GPU).
It seems like the purpose of this article is to humanize this OS that comes from a monopolistic and generally horrible, unethical company; to say “everyone will criticize Windows over anything minor, when it’s actually a great artisan OS made by real people. Look, we put a picture of a baby on the sticker! How cute.”
While I agree that Microsoft employees are real people who aren’t necessarily responsible for the draconian choices of their C-suite lords, and that making any functioning modern OS is no small feat, let’s not pretend that Windows wouldn’t be a better much OS if it was produced by someone else — almost anyone else.
My best guess is that he has devoted most of his working life to Windows, and it would be painful give up on it. He has lived through many dark periods, i.e. ME, Vista, Windows 8, and is probably optimistic about the pendulum swinging back towards quality/fundamentals eventually.
That said, Microsoft was even more of a danger to the industry in 2003, and it was far more of a monopolist. Here he was basically downplaying government scrutiny of Microsoft at the height of their antitrust allegations. I could have made my point more compelling had I realized this came out in 2003.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/aug/22/google-cs...
How dare you violate the government's exclusive right to naked children!
I also think it would be very impolite to make fun of your clients on the internet for a stupid request while naming them explicitly while doing so.
I don't think anyone complained about the hologram or red moon desert background because they disliked windows; they complained because they were hypersensitive to possible inappropriate/sexual connotations in imagery.
(Conversely, I very much doubt that the baby hologram or the red moon desert background swayed anyone to dislike Windows.)
People who hated Windows for being Windows would complain about it on technical grounds. It was terrible, and it crashed all the time. People who hated Windows because it was by Microsoft, would complain about Microsoft's bundling and monopoly tactics.
Usually I wouldn't comment just to point out offtopic, but I think "instant bad thoughts every time windows is mentioned, no matter the context" is another psychological effect caused by Microsoft.